You can choose to show your posts in a standard way, one beneath the other, or in up to 6 columns.

Blog posts displayed in 3 columns

You can display an entry content, an excerpt, or nothing for the posts in the archive pages.

You can also choose if you want to display a featured image or not, a link or a “Read More” button, post info or meta, as well as how many posts you want to show per page, and what type of pagination you want: numeric or Previous/Next.

Let’s get to the Single Entries Default now:

Here, you can choose if you want to display the featured images on both posts and pages, and if you want to remove the post info or meta.

4. Site Layout

As you can see, you have plenty of options here as well.

You can set a default layout or set different ones for the archives, pages, and posts.

There are 9 styles you can choose from:

You can override these settings in individual posts, pages, and archives.

The Boxed Containers settings handle the box shadows and borders that are around different sections, which gives them a boxed appearance.

5. Theme Settings

Here, you can:

Enable or disable update notifications;

Add your Google AdSense Publisher ID;

Enable or disable breadcrumbs for different parts of your site;

Enable or disable comments and trackbacks for different parts of your site – I recommend disabling trackbacks;

There are tons of WordPress web hosts out there (most of them bad) with good marketing, and it’s hard to choose a good one when you are a complete beginner to websites in general, not just to WordPress.

Even I chose a bad hosting when I first started with WordPress.

I was hyped, searched for “best WordPress hosting”, and I landed on those full-blown affiliate websites that make all sorts of tops and put all kinds of crap in them.

Anyway, let’s get back to the speed part.

As you can see, even if the TTFB (time to first byte) is very slow, the speed is still good, with 1.8s Start Render time (should’ve been better), 2.4s Fully Loaded time, and only 45 requests, which is great!

I opted to go with Bluehost’s own caching system, which performs decently from what I can see so far.

I also optimize every site I build as well as possible. I only install essential plugins, I always optimize the images, I don’t add scripts from don’t know how many tools, and so on.

I do care to mention that the site doesn’t currently have Google AdSense on it, Google Analytics, or APIs from social media sites.

Those will increase the requests and the speed result.

Of course, some of them are needed and useful, such as Google Analytics, and I do add them, but for the time being, they weren’t added on this particular site, which isn’t live yet.

IV. Design Customization

When it comes to design customization, the Mai Lifestyle Pro theme disappoints a bit.

I’m talking about typography and colors here, which are pretty important.

Mai Lifestyle Pro Theme Review: Conclusion

If you think it’s a good fit for your WordPress website, then you should definitely go for it!

Even if the price seems a little high, don’t forget that it’s a one-time payment with unlimited usage, so it will end up being very cheap in the long run! And, of course, it’s totally worth it!

Tip: WP Engine Customers Get Access to All StudioPress Themes for FREE

Yes, you read that right!

Since WP Engine bought StudioPress, they offer all the current and future StudioPress themes for free!

So, if you are an existing customer or you’ll become one by purchasing a WordPress web hosting plan from WP Engine (with this link, you’ll get a 20% discount on the first paymentand 2 extra free months), you’ll get all the StudioPress themes for free!

You can kill two birds with one stone!

Note that this doesn’t apply for 3rd party WordPress themes, such as Mai Lifestyle Pro!

That’s a Wrap

I hope you found this Mai Lifestyle Pro review useful, and you managed to decide whether it’s a good choice for you and for your WordPress website!

If you need help setting the theme up, I’m your guy! You just need to contact me!

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4 Comments

Hey Radu, thanks for the write-up! We’re happy to see you enjoyed using Mai Theme :)

A big thing to note is that we run our theme on our Mai Theme Engine plugin, so we can roll out features, fixes, etc, like even more Gutenberg compatibility and you’ll be able to update without losing any customizations that you may have made via code to your child theme. The Sections template was ahead of it’s time for a while, but with Gutenberg (the new block editor) here, we plan to move everything to that, and have already started in some ways.

I’m a big fan of the Mai Lifestyle Pro Theme. It’s included in StudioPress’s premium package and I’ve used it on several websites. You’re right that it’s a bit of a learning curve but the documentation offered is brilliant. Importing the demo content and having a play around before trying to build anything else is a big help – I’d really recommend doing that. Once you get used to it, and the sections, other themes can feel a bit limiting. As for changing fonts, I just add them to the functions.php in the theme.

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Hi, I'm Radu!

I'm the founder and one-man army behind all of this. Even though ThemeSkills was founded in 2014, I've been working with WordPress and SEO since 2011. I also know a bit of Photoshop and a bit more CSS and HTML. I also own WebStoked.com and Radu.link.